This is an interesting question and has several responses beyond the knee-jerk one. First of all, the process was expedited at the request of the authorities, so it's natural that they try to reduce their risks. Also, even if we disregard the expedited process, the release (the rate of production and administering it) is faster than you'd expect normally, which in itself imposes a greater financial/business risk by exposing more people quicker to the same amount of risk.

To say it in a less abstract way: given the normal/expected risk levels (say it's 1:100000), they'd get say a 100 complaints a year for a new vaccine that gets administered to 10 million people. Say they may get brought to the court in one out of those 100 and lose with a 50% chance. And, of course it turns out that something's not right (and say 1:100000 actually dies because of the vaccine, they can still stop it at the 1M or 10M mark).

Now if they roll out the vaccine to 1B people a year, that means 100x more exposure. And it may not worth it business wise. Especially since at least some of the companies forgo (at least some of) the profit. So you have increased risk with decreased profit but increased demand. Perfectly logical move.

If we are talking about us, then let's not forget that while the vaccine definitely poses a higher risk than one that's been on the market for say a decade or more, the choice is not between:

a) I take the vaccine and accept the (small) risk

b) I don't take the vaccine and I don't expose myself to any additional risk

Because dying of covid has a pretty f*&^ high risk when compared to dying from the vaccine. (And covid also seems to cause long term health damage to way more people than it kills.)

But even if we add all this: the EU (and rightly so) did not give indemnity to the pharmaceuticals. (Because while there is logic for them to seek it, there is also logic in not giving it to them.)

I don't think it's appropriate to say up front that they don't have to worry about tail risk. If something happens, then we have the discussion about whether to bail them out. Maybe we should. But only after the fact.

It's one thing to say "we can't make vaccines at a substantial loss", which is reasonable. It's another entirely to say "you have to promise to preserve us from all unknown unknowns". The basic goal of society is not to eliminate all risks from collective enterprise, it's to take the risks off of individuals and put them on the collectives.

As a matter of principle, it just doesn't seem right, and I've never been convinced why nuclear power should get a liability exemption either.

I do think bailouts can be ok. "Socializing the losses" is a feature of living in a society. But what's corrupt is to promise it before we know what the catastrophe might be, that's completely different. In general, organizations (and people) can cause damage far beyond what they can fix. That's life, and bankruptcy. And we don't want to destroy what is left that is valuable. But when that happens, their assets should be systematically divvied up and/or ownership transferred. The people who can make restitution should be required to do so, e.g. the stockholders and/or bondholders. That's what they're there for.

Society already is on the hook if the worst happens, so it's not legitimate to make demands.

> Also, even if we disregard the expedited process, the release (the rate of production and administering it) is faster than you'd expect normally, which in itself imposes a greater financial/business risk by exposing more people quicker to the same amount of risk.

All this seems to dance around the fact that it's the first vaccine of its kind. It induces side effects that are not normal. And the process has been greatly expedited far beyond the usual liberal sentiment that the FDA is indispensable and we should be taking extraordinary amounts of time to approve medicines, etc.

Perhaps there is an asymmetric aggregated risk "exposure" for pharmaceuticals. But I still don't see a huge upside to someone like me who's relatively young, fit and who's had tons of relatives, friends, etc. who've gotten the virus and not only survived but really didn't notice any lasting effects.

> it's the first vaccine of its kind. It induces side effects that are not normal.

It wasn't clear that you were specifically talking about the mRNA vaccines (or maybe just the Pfizer vaccine) as the comment I was replying to mentioned both this and the AstraZeneca one. Also, I'm not sure what non-normal side effects you are talking about WRT the mRNA vaccines. Israel basically ran a huge trial for Pfizer with several million people. I'm pretty sure we know (or will have the data very soon) for all the possible side effects.

> But I still don't see a huge upside to someone like me who's relatively young, fit and who's had tons of relatives,

That's a different question. As I said (maybe in a different comment) you should calculate the probabilities yourself. What you feel doesn't matter. Also, what you see around yourself doesn't matter. What you call a huge upside is up to you, but it's hard to imagine that there is anyone who doesn't get at least a 10x upside. But again, look at the statistics, there are some that tell you how likely you are to die from covid based on your age.

I don't know how old you are, I don't remember all the numbers, but e.g. with the AstraZeneca vaccine in the UK they estimate that 40 out of 17M people had blood clotting problems. (And it's being investigated, which is good.) I don't think there is a single age group with lower COVID mortality than that. Definitely not among adults. So it's worth checking the numbers.

A second thing is that since the vaccines don't provide a 100% immunity, it's never just about yourself, of course, and the circulating virus can (and does) mutate and it may do so in the wrong direction. (It may also mutate towards a simple common cold.)

But since older people have a higher risk of dying from covid, the younger you are the longer you can wait, which means the better you will know the safety because the more people will get it before you. So your best strategy is convincing older people to take the vaccine, because it's what's best for them and you. And then if a few months you'll know better. (I'm pretty sure it will take months until you can get a vaccine if you are that young and healthy. Wherever you live.)

I look at the vaccine vs. virus risk profile quite differently.

I am in my mid-30s, with good levels of vitamin D, and I'm prepared to treat any Covid infection I do get with a protocol including ivermectin and various vitamins which has proven effective where it has been tried in India in Mexico. I'm not going to die from it (certainly don't have a "pretty f*&^ high risk"). The long haul risk is a little bit more substantial, but having a treatment lined up reduces my risk a lot there too, and in the vast majority of cases it is not debilitating and I'm optimistic that treatment methods will be found.

So the "risk of ruin" from the virus is basically nonexistent. What's my risk of ruin from the vaccines? We really have no idea because they're new and almost completely untested (in some cases this is even true of the techniques used). If there's even a 0.1% chance of the vaccine causing some sort of debilitating, significant harm, that's a far worse bargain for me than taking my chances with the virus. The chances of something like antibody dependent enhancement are essentially impossible to predict until the vaccine's interaction with the circulating virus has been observed for many more months (ideally through another winter season). It will probably take at least a couple of years of seeing the vaccine in widespread use for this risk calculus to tilt the other way for me.

> with good levels of vitamin D

which is not proven to have any relevance to Covid-19, unfortunately.

> I'm prepared to treat any Covid infection I do get with a protocol including ivermectin and various vitamins which has proven effective where it has been tried in India in Mexico.

Please do not spread potentially dangerous health misinformation and false hopes, even in good faith. If there was such a protocol that worked, the world would know.

Now that Hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 has been thoroughly debunked, snake oil peddlers have apparently moved on to Ivermectin. Efficacy-wise it seems to be taking the exact same path as HCQ, unfortunately. Hopefully this time around, no more precious research time and resources than strictly necessary will be wasted trying to prove again and again that the "Internet's miracle cure" does. not. work.

More here : https://forbetterscience.com/2020/12/15/ivermectin-now-again...

> The long haul risk is a little bit more substantial

Between one in six and one in three people, to be precise. A "little bit more" indeed.

> in the vast majority of cases it is not debilitating

76% of hospitalised patients still have symptoms after 6 months. https://theconversation.com/how-many-people-get-long-covid-a...

"Autumn COVID-19 surge dates in Europe correlated to latitudes, not to temperature-humidity, pointing to vitamin D as contributing factor": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81419-w

> Please do not spread potentially dangerous health misinformation and false hopes, even in good faith. If there was such a protocol that worked, the world would know.

Just because you have convinced yourself that legitimate treatments for Covid could never possibly be suppressed because they are not profitable, does not mean that is actually the case. Your attempts at ideological discipline disguised as "just trying to keep the forum free of dangerous misinformation" are not going to work with me.

The pattern of "HCQ didn't work, therefore Covid is untreatable and any other suggested therapies are quackery" has certainly gotten a lot of mileage since HCQ flamed out as a standalone treatment, but it is baldly anti-scientific thinking. Some other good signs of motivated, un-scientific reasoning are peppered throughout the blog post you linked (which by the way was written long before the release of numerous RCTs demonstrating ivermectin's effectiveness), such as frequent use of the term "Covidiots" or using the Surgisphere researchers (who as far as I can tell were grifters paid to discredit HCQ) to tar ivermectin because they mentioned it once.

The NIH finally had to withdraw its recommendation against ivermectin in mid-January. Of course they're still maintaining the line of "there's insufficient studies to recommend its use and we're certainly not going to fund any!" but the trend is continuing in this direction and RCTs are continuing to pile up showing its effectiveness in fending off severe cases when taken early.

Also, good news! HCQ has actually been shown to be effective in combination with other drugs like bromhexine which block the virus entry pathways that HCQ misses. Perhaps not as significant now that far better treatments like fluvoxamine and ivermectin are out there, but it still show that HCQ is a far cry from "snake oil." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7175911/

> Between one in six and one in three people, to be precise. A "little bit more" indeed.

Is it your serious contention that up to one in three people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop long haul symptoms?

> 76% of hospitalised patients still have symptoms after 6 months.

Yes, and in how many of those cases are those symptoms debilitating? What percentage of people infected are even hospitalized in the first place?

> Yes, and in how many of those cases are those symptoms debilitating? What percentage of > people infected are even hospitalized in the first place?

Yes, how many? Shouldn't you know it if you are advocating (or at least considering) just catching the virus instead of getting vaccinated? Esp. since we do know the risks of the latter with a pretty high confidence and the scientific consensus is that you should definitely choose the vaccine and not get infected.

But to give you a number I heard: here in Hungary 3% were hospitalized for the "base" variant. Now we have the UK variant and it seems to present a higher hospitalization rate. According to a UK study it has a 55% higher fatality rate too. So with 3% you get 2.28% chance of having symptoms after 6 months (or dying). Doesn't sound good at all. That's 1 in 40 people. More than a million times the risk of getting a blood clot from e.g. AstraZeneca if it is real (and if they've discovered all the cases, of course).

I'm pretty sure it doesn't apply to the HN crowd, but on a side note, I found it quite interesting how people consistently get probabilities wrong. They may be afraid of something happening with say 1:100 000 chance (severe vaccination side effect) and saying that something else, with more severe consequences shouldn't be afraid of, because it happens pretty infrequently (dying of covid infection which we don't know exactly but is somewhere between 2:100 - 1:1000). Usually, of course, people say these in different conversations, or at least in separate comments (if online) but they'll have a hard time reconcile these even if you point out that these are numbers that they can actually compare. (Of course, I get it's the cognitive dissonance and their irrational fear of vaccines, or maybe the loss of control, still it's fascinating.)

Like many of us here, you clearly seem to be a smart person, with expertise in one or several technical fields, and confidence in your ability to learn a new one and apply your existing knowledge and mental models to it. You've probably done this many times before.

Please accept that this does not make you immune to the good old "Mt Stupid" phase of the Dunning-Krüger curve. In fact, "smart hackers" like us are really prime examples of people who might fall for it. I contend that you are currently stuck there on Covid, and together with other smart people you're finding yourself inadvertently aligned with very dumb run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorists that you would normally want nothing to do with. Please don't take that as an insult and bear with me for a moment :

Without even getting into a debate about Ivermectin, have you considered what else should be true in order for your current take on Covid severity and treatments to be correct ?

It would take a majority of people around the world who have dedicated their lives to this topic to be wrong, or careless, dumb or plain evil. Many of them are doctors and researchers who are not only acting in good faith and genuinely want nothing more than to help their patients or advance science, but perhaps more convincingly, also have personal, visceral, "can't lie about it" interests at stake, like desperately wanting to save a colleague, dear friend, or their own dad or spouse.

Please do not insult them (and delude yourself) by automatically assuming that you know better than them, that they failed to save their mom, dad or friend because they didn't want it enough. If you believe that the powers that be (institutional research / politicians / regulators / big pharma / whatever) are broken / dysfunctional / stupid and prevent the truth from surfacing, and that people like yourself are gonna disrupt the shit out of the system, stop it now. This is the definition of arrogance, and you're deluding yourself.

I could stop here really.

But let me just answer a few of the points you raised (and then I'll consider my efforts at convincing a stranger done : do whatever you like with it) :

> Just because you have convinced yourself that legitimate treatments for Covid could never possibly be suppressed because they are not profitable,

This is a strawman argument, I do not think that. But I do use Occam's razor, and there is a much simpler explanation to the current absence of early stage treatments than a "suppression" conspiracy theory : that we really did try but simply have not found one that works yet.

This suppression theory was already untenable for the reasons most conspiracy theories are, but it should have been killed for good when 3 things happened :

1. A cheap generic drug, dexamethasone, is found to be our only effective treatment (albeit late stage only) with a 30% fatality reduction.

2. Remdesivir, the "big pharma contender" in an imaginary battle against HCQ that some insisted was happening, is found to be ineffective and is dropped without discussion.

3. In the same trials, HCQ is not outright dismissed just because it originated from quack doctors circles, but given the same fair chance as others.

> The pattern of "HCQ didn't work, therefore Covid is untreatable and any other suggested therapies are quackery

This is again a strawman argument. Covid may be treatable. When it comes to prioritizing research, it is unlikely that a treatment touted by the same circles that touted HCQ, using the same flawed reasoning (something that does work in vitro should work in vivo) is going to be THE miracle cure. But it should still be allocated some resources to verify that. It has been, and the results are unsurprisingly, nothing to write home about.

> Is it your serious contention that up to one in three people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop long haul symptoms?

Depending on the definition of "long haul", yes : https://theconversation.com/how-many-people-get-long-covid-a...

"According to a recent survey done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 35% of nonhospitalized patients who had mild COVID-19 cases did not return to baseline health 14 to 21 days after their symptoms started. And this wasn’t just in older people or people with underlying health conditions. Twenty percent of previously healthy 18-to-34-year-olds had ongoing symptoms. Overall, research shows as many as one-third of individuals who had COVID-19 and weren’t hospitalized will still be experiencing symptoms up to three months later."

> Yes, and in how many of those cases are those symptoms debilitating? What percentage of people infected are even hospitalized in the first place?

I will let you look this up, and immediately after ask yourself whether it would make more sense to reason in absolute numbers to better visualize the burden it will cause on society (hint : it would)

Depending on the country, we're talking about giving millions of previously healthy young people brain fog and premature cardiovascular aging. This testimonial is great : https://twitter.com/a_straight_line/status/13714925394511831...

We're talking about letting ICUs run at full capacity for months, causing widespread grief in families, unbearable pressure on doctors/nurses, and consequences for every age group (including the 20 year olds involved in a car accident and not getting the care they could have). Not to mention that every new case is a ticket in the evolution lottery for variants.

So yeah, you probably shouldn't be second-guessing the benefits/risk profile of vaccines for people your age, and in any case please stop with the "99.x% survive this thing"/"as a healthy 30-something I shouldn't be forced to ..." narrative. It doesn't make you look good and more importantly, it definitely hurts society and it could very well hurt you or someone you love directly.

> If you believe that the powers that be (institutional research / politicians / regulators / big pharma / whatever) are broken / dysfunctional / stupid and prevent the truth from surfacing

I don't believe it, I know it, because I read the news and don't shy away from its implications. Millions of lives were destroyed by the opioid epidemic, a crime which required the complicity and silence of almost all the institutions you cite. None of them have suffered any real consequences whatsoever. But hey, that's all in the past, I'm sure it's just crazy talk to think those same institutional imperatives could be creating any problems now.

This is a strictly local problem with the brokenness and corruptness of healthcare in the USA.

> Twenty percent of previously healthy 18-to-34-year-olds had ongoing symptoms. Overall, research shows as many as one-third of individuals who had COVID-19 and weren’t hospitalized will still be experiencing symptoms up to three months later."

There's a million variables at play here, is it a random twenty percent? My guess would be that at least in the US 20~40% all age groups are seriously unhealthy to begin with.

Even if you migh not have you health ruined by covid, getting infected still makes it possible for you to infect others who might not be so lucky.

While vaccination apparently doesn't completely prevent you from infecting others, all studies as far as I can tell say that they reduce the risk quite substantially.

So it stands to reason that if the vaccine were effective, after the vaccine blitzkrieg that's going on now, the vulnerable should be ok.

I don't believe I am obligated to take an experimental vaccine in order to reduce the risk that I will transmit a virus with a 99.95% survival rate for people under 70. And while I'm optimistic about the prospect for these vaccines to reduce transmission in the short run, it remains to be seen how well they will work over the long term against the evolving virus.

They will work fine because this virus can't evolve for shit. It's only produced 2-3 strains and only has one external protein it can mutate. The current vaccines are still good enough against it, and it doesn't take long to edit an mRNA vaccine either.

> I will transmit a virus with a 99.95% survival rate for people under 70.

This math is wrong, you should think of it as getting a flu but ten times worse that also gives you a permanent heart condition. And remember that the flu is already ten times worse than you think it is, because the last thing you thought was a flu was just a cold.

> you should think of it as getting a flu but ten times worse that also gives you a permanent heart condition

Perhaps we should think of it as getting SARS-Cov-2 and as much as 1/3 of people don't even know they're infected.

Unhealthy people are often really hit hard, the most vulnerable have a substantial risk of death.

But an overwhelming number of healthy people are fine, and given the prolonged disruption of normal life, those people suffer vast consequences from interventions that outweigh catching the virus.

Children especially are being sacrificed for the elderly and chronically ill.

I’m glad that you’ve come to the conclusion that if you did get COVID that actually you’d be fine so it doesn’t matter.

You might be right. You very well could be wrong. There are plenty of people who thought they’d be fine or it didn’t even exist and a non-trivial number of them are dead now.

This is a backwards argument and doesn’t stand up to basic logical scrutiny. You’re inventing the numbers and deciding based on the numbers you’ve come up with the conclusion.

That’s your prerogative but let’s be clear that you’re not basing this math on anything other than your gut feelings.

I'm in the same boat, I'm not against vaccination either. I've taken every vaccine offered, I get the yearly flu vaccine and even went out of my way for the HPV vaccine.

Same, I and my family have all our routine shots, although we're not all that consistent about the flu.

This is not completely correct, at least in the EU there have not been any emergency vaccine authorisations by the EMA which means that pharmaceutical companies will be liable for mistakes that cause adverse health effects.

In the UK there was an emergency authorisation which means that they will not be liable to the same degree.

As for why they do this: There is always a small chance that the vaccine will cause adverse health effects because pharmaceutical stuff is very complex. Minimizing legal risks is a completely normal thing in all industries and part of the negotiation process. I would not draw the conclusion that they aren't 100% convinced of their vaccine but instead that their team of highly paid lawyers told them what was a good business decision.

You're being pretty generous, and I think it sounds reasonable but placed within the broader picture (and given how liberals generally consider profit-driven healthcare systems and industry in other circumstances...) it seems like people are looking to paper over some dastardly stuff and dismiss legitimate concerns so as to not "rock the boat."

For instance:

> Officials from Argentina and the other Latin American country, which cannot be named as it has signed a confidentiality agreement with Pfizer, said the company’s negotiators demanded more than the usual indemnity against civil claims filed by citizens who suffer serious adverse events after being inoculated. They said Pfizer also insisted the governments cover the potential costs of civil cases brought as a result of Pfizer’s own acts of negligence, fraud, or malice. In Argentina and Brazil, Pfizer asked for sovereign assets to be put up as collateral for any future legal costs.

https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/23/pfizer-plays-hardball-in...

It'd be one thing if they were looking to defend against unforeseen damages. But this looks like they're trying to evade liability for crimes.

Interesting points, I did not know about these actions in South America. I don't want to be too generous to Pfizer/Biontech and you rightly point out the need to be cautious with these companies especially if they are in such an influential position. However my guess would be that legal risks in countries with weaker rule of law protections (for reference see this report https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/) is a lot higher. You might find yourself in a position where a court rules against you although you did not commit any crime – or you might presume that there is a possibility that you will be in such a position. If you want to protect yourself and have an extremely strong negotiation position, you might write very far-reaching liability clauses.

This in itself could – imo rightfully – be seen as a deplorable strategy because you are dictating these rules for a life saving vaccine. But it does not imply that you are committing any crimes at the moment.